Humans can determine locations of sounds by comparing sounds perceived at each ear. The brain can determine the location of a sound source by utilizing subtle intensity, spectral, and timing differences of the sound perceived in each ear.
The intensity, spectra, and arrival time of the sound at each ear is characterized by a head-related transfer function (HRTF) unique to each user.
In virtual-reality systems, it is advantageous to generate an accurate virtual acoustic environment for users that reproduce sounds for sources at different virtual locations to create an immersive virtual-reality environment. When there are many distinct sound sources, treating them all as separate sound sources is computationally complex, making it difficult to render all of the sounds in real-time. On the other hand, if many sound sources are combined, it creates a disparity between the visual location of objects in the VR world and the perceived auditory locations of the objects. Because of the complexity of having many audio sources, conventional approaches typically fail to provide a real-time VR environment with accurate source positioning.